Klutz

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When Tom Hastings discovers that his grandmother lived a short walk from Else Lubranczyk, a middle-class Jewish seamstress whose letters are kept in the Holocaust Centre North Archive, he travels to Berlin. Else’s letters to her refugee daughter, Helga, tell a story of ordinary life in Schöneberg; of recriminations, fantasies of reunion, and thwarted attempts to get out. But where the author’s grandmother fled, Else and her niece, Steffi Levy, were deported to Theresienstadt in 1943.

Visiting the shops, streets, and synagogues mentioned by Else, Hastings searches Berlin for signs of Jewish life of the 1930’s and 1940’s. Along the way, he confronts his own Jewishness against the fraught contemporary scene of German Staatsräson and the crackdown on solidarity. 

Klutz is about stumbling towards something and not getting there, and finding something else instead.

About Tom Hastings:

Dr Tom Hastings is Lecturer in Dance at The Place, London. Tom works on contemporary performance at the intersection of politics, and theories of race and gender. He has previously taught at Roehampton University, University of East London, and Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. His research broadly concerns the social aspects of performance.